Calmly Awaiting Armageddon

It had happened before. I had read about it in the papers.

The town had been called Houston. No one is quite sure what happened in Houston. First it went dark, literally. From space it must have looked like a little black mole on night lit America. No one could talk to anyone in it and no one tried to call out of it. It was like a wall went down around the city and those that were in and those left without just forgot about one another. Until the morning we all woke up and remembered but by then it was too late. Six months had passed and they were gone.

Every single one of them was gone. No survivors. No bodies. No wreckage.

All that was left was a big and scary and empty city waiting for the treasure hunters, the looters, the scientists and the government’s detectives.

Some said it was haunted. The web is filled with stories of people in Houston who still “See” things and hear things whispering at them. They keep posting pictures of beds and closet doors online as proof. Of what, lord knows. I never put much faith in it. The only people dumb enough to go there without license are those that have lost someone and, generally, the grieving do not make for reliable witnesses.

Some said it was infested, that this was an experimental first strike of some creature Mother Earth herself created to rid herself of the cancer that is eating away at her. Then they take another bong hit and shut up about such things because the girls are back with the pizza and already stripping out of their wet clothes.

Some said that it had been a government experiment with chemical weapons and, as usual, there were a lot of people who said nothing but that those people were crazy if they thought the government had their shit together enough to pull off anything even remotely close to this when they still couldn’t figure out health care coverage.

People found themselves going back to the churches, as they often did when confronted with something science couldn’t explain to them. It’s one thing to be the tough guy when you’re the biggest kid on the block. But when you get your nose bloodied and your jeans tore and you’ve no idea why or how it happened it really isn’t hard to fall back onto the idea of a big brother who can just smack down that bullshit if you ask him nicely enough.

This was the rapture, some claim. The people of Houston were good and honest folk and the people of Houston were holy. They had been called on up to the Lord and the rest of us were left, twiddling our thumbs waiting for the final days. I can’t think of a single time I thought of Houston, or any of Texas, as good or honest or holy.

I read all this while I lay in a hospital bed with an untreated gunshot wound in the leg killing me, real painfully and really, really slow.

Was I alone?

Yes.

I hadn’t seen another soul in days.

Was I a sinner?

Perhaps.

Was I the last of my kind?

Absolutely.

I was certainly the last one with my name.

I hear it under the bed asking questions of me and I want, badly, to whisper to it. I always have. Ever since I was a child I have known when it was near and I have wanted to talk to it.

I look from my gouged, bleeding and decaying leg to the window and the pale red, smoke filled sky. __

I’ve been dreaming, a lot, about doors and siege engines and things that are the natural born enemies of walls.

It asks me if I think it is fair that it should all end like this.

Doors and siege engines and sledge hammers and things that are the natural born enemies of walls. __It was the hottest night of the year, so of course something was going to happen. Everyone in town knew something was going to happen that night. You put two people in a small apartment together in this kind of heat and it doesn’t fucking matter how much they love one another. Something is going to be said. Something is going to be done to set one of them off. Love is irrelevant. The pot always boils over.

On the roads out of town the police cruisers sat, lights spinning slow as the officers lay on the hood waiting for the first of the calls to come.

They lay there smoking and sipping coffee and staring up into the tar black sky. In the church Father Ames knelt in prayer on the worn green rug of his small bedroom knowing that the call would come in the morning that something had happened. He could feel it in the air.

He could smell it in the stink of his own sweat. When the morning came he would get the call that someone had fallen. He would get the call that he would have a funeral mass to say. So he knelt there praying not that God reach down and stop the inevitable death but that he, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, take out one of the Protestants or wife beating shit heads out there and leave his little flock alone.

Something was going to happen.

They blamed it on the heat, on the humidity, on the fact that the only people that seemed to sleep were the men of the town. From every window in every house you could hear the rumbling from deep in their throats; that thick and wet snoring that comes only from a man who's fallen to bed stone drunk.

It was the hottest night of the year and maybe that was the excuse that the women and children were using to stay awake. Kids forced to lay in the sweltering darkness started whispering to the things under their beds about fairness and how they wanted to be strong because the strong made things fair. The women smoked, and played cards, and sweat.

From the inside we knew it.

After Houston we knew that the wall had come down. They don’t need to sit on the roads out of town. They really don’t.

We are not going anywhere. There is nowhere to go.

This is home, and we are here to witness it and to play our assigned roles.

Something was going to happen. We all knew it. We were all awake and waiting for it.

When I stumbled from my room and down the hall I saw my mother and my grandmother, both in their undergarments, sitting in front of a slowly circulating fan playing cribbage.

My father was rumbling from the guestroom at the end of the hall. It wasn’t his most nuanced performance. I could tell. My mom probably could too. She’s the one who had spent the better part of thirty years sleeping beside him. But it fooled my grandfather who was snoring in sympathy from his own bed.

The men too, I suppose, sensed that something was going to happen this night.

Maybe that's why they all went drinking.

Yes,the little boy whispers as he rolls over onto his belly and fitfully kicks the blankets off of his chubby little legs. Yes. Yes I will.

I walked to the kitchen, poured a sink full of water and dunked my head in it a few times. The first was to cool me off. It failed. The second one was to clean me. I guess it might have worked. I avoided looking at my mom and my grandma at the table although I could feel their eyes on me. I imagine I was an image after all standing there in glow in the dark Muppet boxers and white sports socks. I dunk my head a third time to drown. I reach around and try to hold my head under the water and try to force myself to take one big deep breath. That’s all I will need. One deep breath.

I lacked the will power for this last one so I snapped my head up and shook it dry.

It was the hottest night of the year. And there were things to be done. From the kitchen drawer I draw the largest of the knives and I walk out into the yard.

The little boy smiles into his pillow before scrunching his eyes shut as tight as he can. He squeezes his shirt as tight as he can in his right hand and reaches off the bed, into the darkness with his left. He waits for it to see. He waits for it to smell. He waits for it to come from the darkness under the bed.

I stand there watching the flies buzz around the bare outdoor bulb. I scratch myself and shudder at the touch of my hand on my skin. In my boxer shorts I walk out to where the light fades and sit on the fast yellowing and brittle grass.

I turn my eyes to the night sky. The stars were wavering in the heat haze.

The trees were barren and dying. The shrubbery was bare.

"These times are omens," my Grandmother called out to me. "You make sure you and yours are safe. And then you wait for the storm to come, and you weather it. But you always make sure that you and yours are safe."

There was nary a doubt in mind.

Prophecy I guess. It infects some members of my family.

It was the hottest night of the year. Of course it was going to happen tonight.

People were boiling. Stirring. Children whisper to the things under their beds.

Men too large and too stupid to try to do two things at once are attempting to maintain the fake smoking as they reach for things they keep in a shoeboxes and lock boxes in bedrooms and workshops.

Something he could never justify bringing into a good Christian house.

Something he brought into it for exactly that reason.

The lids on the pots were rattling.

The wall was down and someone had ratcheted up the heat.

From space, it must have looked like a second mole had appeared on night lit America.

I see my Grandma at the window, silhouetted and skeletal and oblivious to the shadow behind her. Her eyes are the strangest shade… faint orange... her eyes are dying candlelight.

I lay back on the grass and waited with my eyes on the stars.

I reckon it won’t be long now.

One of the officers laying on his cruiser on the road out of town turns off his radio, tosses his cigarette and draws his gun.

A terrified little girl sits in her garage, her brother’s baseball bat shaking in her hands as she holds it towards the door to the kitchen.

Every single one of them was gone. No survivors. No bodies. No wreckage.

I hear it in the bushes asking questions of me and I want, badly, to whisper to it.

I always have. Ever since I was a child I have known when it was near and I have wanted to talk to it.

I’ve been dreaming, a lot, about doors and siege engines and things that are the natural born enemies of walls.

I wait for the shots.

I wait for the screams.

From down the road I hear sirens. The night air smells of burning.

I wait to see where he will put his bullet in me.

Gail, our neighbor over the fence screams.

I hear the sound of metal hitting bone. A bloody frying pan flies like errant comet and lands in the yard by my feet.

I say good-bye to the bit of her husband Walter that lands on my thigh.

I wait to see if I am strong enough.

I wait to see if I am fast enough.

Grandma vanishes in the roar of a gunshot. The little girl screams as he catches the ball bat on the thigh and shakes his head at her. His eyes glow orange. The little boy screams into the pillow when it touches his hand. His eyes glow orange. He stands at the kitchen window staring at me. His eyes glow orange.